As a full time desktop Linux user since 1999 (the actual year of the Linux desktop, I swear) I wish all you Windows folks the best of luck on the next clean install 👍
…and Happy 30th Birthday “New Technology” File System!
Literally today. That’s why I brought it up. I installed updates and had to reboot twice to finish the task.
Many Linux package managers themselves tell you you should reboot your system after updates, especially if the update has touched system packages. You can definitely run into problems that will leave you scratching your head if you don’t.
*nix systems are not immune to needing reboots after updates. I work as an escalation engineer for an IT support firm and our support teams that do *nix updates without reboots have DEFINATELY been the cause of some hard to find issues. We’ll often review environment changes first thing during an engagement only to fix the issue to find that it was from some update change 3 months ago where the team never rebooted to validate the new config was good. Not gonna argue that in general its more stable and usually requires less reboots, but its certainly not the answer to every Windows pitfall.
The only time you truly need to reboot is when you update your kernel.
The solution to this problem is live-patching. Not really a game changer with consumer electronics because they don’t have to use ECC, but with servers that can take upwards of 10 minutes to reboot, it is a game changer.
We have an Ubuntu machine at work with an NVIDIA GPU we use for CUDA. Every time CUDA has an update, CUDA throws obtuse errors until reboot.
To say only kernel updates require reboot is naive.
Seems to be sloppy engineering. We ran a huge multi site operation on Linux and did not need to.
